Social life cycle assessment of Swedish organic and conventional pork production

Abstract

Purpose Sustainable animal food systems are increasingly important to society. Yet for pork, the most consumed meat product in Europe, there is no social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) in the literature. The breath and complexity of social issues and lack of data makes the task challenging. This study examines the risk of negative social impacts in Swedish pork production systems and includes workers, farmers, consumers, local community, society, and pigs as stakeholders. Methods The objective was to assess the risk of negative social impacts for the production and consumption of 1000-kg pork (fork weight—bone free meat including cooking losses) originating from two different systems: organic and conventional pork production. Relevant social sustainability issues for pork production systems were identified through a literature search and a consultative workshop with experts. A life cycle inventory was conducted to collect data for activity variables and compute Social Risk (SR), a measure of the risk of negative social impacts related to a reference (here the average European social conditions). Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) was used to obtain weights for subcategories. The SR scores and the weights were used to calculate Social Risk Time (SRT) that relates the Social Risk to the functional unit by considering the ‘exposure’ to the risk, and the Social Hotspot Index (SHI), which relates the SRT to the worst possible situation for that system. Results and discussion The conventional pork system had 42% of inventory indicators with SR > 0.5 and the organic pork system had 32%. For all stakeholders, the pig farm had the largest SRT in both production systems except for workers in the organic pork system where the soybean farm had the largest SRT. In the conventional pork system, society as well as farmers at the pig farm had SHI > 0.5 slightly, meaning performing the same as European average. In the organic pork system, SHI < 0.5 for all stakeholders and subsystems. Conclusion Swedish pork production has lower risk of negative social impacts than the average European social conditions for most of the stakeholders: workers, pigs, local community, and consumers. Farmers and society at the subsystem pig farm have the same risk of negative social impacts as the average European social conditions. Due to the dependence of the results of the chosen reference level, the reliance on certification, and the indicators included, results should be interpreted and used with care.

DEXiAqua, a Model to Assess the Sustainability of Aquaculture Systems: Methodological Development and Application to a French Salmon Farm

“…Indicators related to animal welfare were also considered in the "meeting social expectations" branch related to society. Previous SLCA studies in the field of animal production highlighted that this social aspect of the sector must be considered and evaluated [64,65]. To our knowledge, this is the first time an SLCA framework has been applied to aquaculture.…”

Social Consideration in Product Life Cycle for Product Social Sustainability

“…Table 1 indicates the sectors of the S-LCA studies. It shows that, to date, the social life cycle assessment has been evaluated in various sectors including the agricultural sector, such as [50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61] olive production [52], palm oil [53,54], sugarcane [55], pork production [56] cocoa production [57], honey [58], dairy farm [59], citrus production [60], and soybean [61]; the industrial sector, for example assessment of S-LCA on sugar industry [62], water [63,64], bioelectricity [65], energy [66], wood-based products [67], jewelry [68], waste management [69], computer software [70], laptop [71], bridges [72], technology [73], recycling [74], tourism [75], welding technology [76], (see Table 1). Walters and Mirkouei (2020) evaluated environmental and social LCA of the computer software industry to compare different scenarios to reduce time and CO 2 emission, and increase job satisfaction [70].…”

“…European pork production has the largest negative social risk versus Swedish pork production. Social risk indicator (SRI) and social hotspot indicator (SHI) identified as appropriate tools for evaluation of negative social impacts [56].…”

“…The stakeholders included in S-LCA studies are listed in the table below (Table 3). As can be seen, limited research has placed an emphasis on all five concerned stakeholders (worker, local community, consumer, value chain actors, and society) [56,66,70,85,89,94]. In S-LCA, the majority of authors considered employees and local community stakeholders in related subcategories [50,51,64,65,68,69,81,88].…”

Social Aspects in the Assessment of Biobased Value Chains

“…For example, Ref. [99] added "farmers" as a further stakeholder separate to the stakeholder "workers", and [100] included "farm owners". Even if social aspects of the suggested stakeholder "smallholder and family farms" partially overlap with those of the stakeholder "workers" and "local community", a specific definition of this stakeholder and related social aspects is required.…”